DE AMICITIA
I
They were walking home from the theatre.
'Well, Mr White,' said Valentia, 'I think it was just fine.'
'It was magnificent!' replied Mr White.
And they were separated for a moment by the crowd, streaming up from the Français towards the Opera and the Boulevards.
'I think, if you don't mind,' she said, 'I'll take your arm, so that we shouldn't get lost.'
He gave her his arm, and they walked through the Louvre and over the river on their way to the Latin Quarter.
Valentia was an art student and Ferdinand White was a poet. Ferdinand considered Valentia the only woman who had ever been able to paint, and Valentia told Ferdinand that he was the only man she had met who knew anything about Art without being himself an artist. On her arrival in Paris, a year before, she had immediately inscribed herself, at the offices of the New York Herald, Valentia Stewart, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A. She settled down in a respectable pension, and within a week was painting vigorously. Ferdinand White arrived from Oxford at about the same time, hired a dirty room in a shabby hotel, ate his meals at cheap restaurants in the Boulevard St Michel, read Stephen Mallarmé, and flattered himself that he was leading 'la vie de Bohême.'